Asked what has allowed Colorado’s free-market think tank, the Independence Institute, to live long enough for a 25th-anniversary celebration tonight, the organization’s famously bawdy president offers a joke.

That attention-grabbing style sets apart the tax-hating, charter-school- loving stable of conservative thinkers from its peers and has helped it continue to provide ammunition and armor to those aiming for smaller government.

Even critics credit the institute with inching political discourse to the right and crafting definitions — “bureaucrats” instead of “public servants” — that have made lawmakers consider how libertarians will view everything from transportation projects to revisions of the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Looking back on 25 years, Caldara said in earnest that some of the organization’s greatest achievements have been blocking what it sees as bad ideas and laying the groundwork for conservative change.

“We make ideas palatable,” said Caldara, who has been with the institute since 1998. “Other politicians or individuals take credit and get the final push done. But without us, I don’t think they’d be ready for it.”

The institute got Colorado ready for TABOR and began pushing charter schools long before they became hot political topics, he said.

While a state-focused, conservative think tank was a novel idea a quarter century ago, similar groups have since set up shop across the country, many using the Independence Institute’s model, said Tracie Sharp, whose State Policy Network provides resources to such organizations.

Liberals have meanwhile fought back with their own new wave of policy drivers and public-outreach groups that have pushed Colorado to the fore in political organizing.

If it weren’t for the Independence Institute, liberal advocacy group ProgressNow wouldn’t exist said founder Michael Huttner.

“It was because of them and the people funding them that (we had to prevent) this state from going off the right-wing deep end,” Huttner said.

John Andrews in 1984 left his work at the Michigan-based Shavano Institute, a college- backed conservative group that sponsored policy debates in Colorado. Shortly thereafter, Andrews opened the doors to the Independence Institute to help carry out the “Reagan Revolution” of limited government and more state control, he said.

The institute stayed in the realm of policy papers and quiet toil until Tom Tancredo took the helm from Andrews — who went on to the legislature — in 1993 and began broadcasting on TV and radio.

“You have to be active enough to let people know you’re there,” said Tancredo, who went on to serve as a Republican congressman from Douglas County. “We have made it a ‘do tank’ as well as a ‘think tank.’ “

Caldara, a showman with a flair for the dramatic and a willingness to flout decorum, became to free-market reform what Andrews said “P.T. Barnum was to the circus.”

Caldara has lit money afire and pushed a 10-foot-high stack of textbooks down the Capitol steps, both to prove points in policy debates, Andrews said.

The institute annually throws a party celebrating booze, cigars and firearms, which doubles as a caution against “nannyism.”

The antics coupled with seductively simple slogans — “It’s your dough. Just say ‘No’ ” during the FasTracks debate — have helped keep the institute in the public eye as Democrats took over the state, said Colorado State University political scientist John Straayer.

“Probably more than any other similar organization in the state, they’ve been able to penetrate the public consciousness,” he said. “They’ve had an impact by keeping their political philosophy in the headlines.”

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